I guess this would be quite useful to eveyone who wants to play their characters on their notebooks or even while having a break at the office without having to worry about copying one's profile to a thumbdrive everytime.
What do I need?
1) A (free) Dropbox account.
2) Some possibility to create hardlinks on Windows. I recommend Link Shell Extension (free too).
How does it work?
Dropbox is a free service that enables you to synchronize a specific folder on your PC with Dropbox's online storage (1 GByte for free) in near realtime. That means that any file that is created or modified in this folder will get uploaded to your account's storage automatically. Seems to be perfect for our purpose.
But wait, unfortunately Dropbox doesn't support multiple folders or renaming the default one ("My Dropbox"). So we have to improvise a bit.
Gladly Windows' filesystem NTFS supports so-called "hardlinks". This should sound familiar to everyone who worked a bit with Linux or Unix systems.
But although the filesystem supports this feature natively for years, Microsoft seemed to forget to provide any tool to create those links. So we have to use a 3rd party utility to create them. (As Entropy pointed out below, there in fact is a built-in command. Feel free to use that if you don't want to install an additional utility)
For this Howto I assume you're using the tool I mentioned above.
Allright, enough of this techie-stuff. What do I have to do?
1) Download Dropbox from here, install it and create your free account. While installing you should keep the default location of Dropbox' folder. Don't set it to Torchlight's profile directory. This would mess up the profile with some default folders.
2) Download and install Link Shell Extension from here. This will add the option to create links into the Explorer's context menu.
3) Move (don't copy) the following two folders from your Torchlight profile to your Dropbox folder: "save" and "mods" *
You can find the profile by entering this to your "Run" prompt: %appdata%\runic games\torchlight\
Dropbox's default location is the folder "My Dropbox" inside your "Documents" directory. ("My Documents" for XP and 2000).
(while you're at it: backup your save folder. It's never wrong to keep a copy before moving stuff around)
4) After you moved the folders select them in your Dropbox directory, right-click them and choose "Pick link source" from the context-menu.
Now get back to Torchlight's profile folder (where "save" and "mods" originally were), right-click empty space and select "Drop as ... Junction".
(Alternatively you can drag those folders with your right mousebutton to the destination folder and select "Drop here ... Junction")
5) That was all. You will notice that any change inside one folder affects the other. A hardlink (or Juntion in this case) is some kind of "wormhole" on your harddisk. So both "folders" are in fact the same. It just has two doors
Now go ahead and do exactly this (apart from point 3, see below**) on your other PCs. Dropbox will then upload any change on one PC to the server and every other PC will download it automatically. This way you don't have to worry about anything. Just play, save on one PC, get to another PC and continue playing there
Have fun. I hope you find this useful
FAQ
Q: Do I need to be online to access my Dropbox / profile / characters?
A: No, Dropbox uploads a copy of the folder's content. If you're changing the contents of the folder while being offline they will get synchronized as soon as you're connected to the Internet again.
Q: What happens if both profiles are being changed before they get synchronized?
A: Dropbox will detect this conflict and creates a renamed copy of the file in the same folder.
Q: What happens if I delete a file inside the linked folder/Junction?
A: Everything that happens inside a linked folder happens in the other one as well.
If you think of a folder being a room, a link is just another door into this room.
Q: Why should I include the folder "mods" as well?
A: This is only meant as a precaution to make sure that you won't run into issues as soon as you have some mods installed, which your characters are using.
Keep in mind though, that you only have 1 GByte of free storage and might reach the limit when installing some giant full-conversion mod
in the future. But considering the fact, that the whole unmodified game itself fits into your Dropbox, I don't see that as an immediate issue.
Q: Are there any other cool features?
A: A nice side-effect by using Dropbox is, that you can login to your Dropbox via their webinterface and undelete or restore old revisions of your files.
This can be used for good or evil, if you know what I mean
*Don't move the whole torchlight folder if you don't want to use identical settings on all your PCs or change them every time you played on another PC.
**In case you already have another profile on your other PCs, don't move the original profile folders to Dropbox. This would overwrite your already set up profile. You have to merge it instead. Each character has it's own numbered savegame. The first one 0.svt, the second 1.svt and so on. Rename your additional character files according to this and move the files to your Dropbox\save directory. Keep in mind that there is only one file for your shared stash! If there are items you want to merge with another stash, pick them up with one of your characters before(!) you move the folders and put them back in after your profiles are set up for synchronization.
